What Credit Card Should You Use? There’s an App for That

Santa Monica based Wallaby Financial, whose company aims to provide a cloud-based digital wallet solution designed to maximize users credit card rewards, announced the release of it’s Android app, after initially launching on iOS back in November. With the average consumer confused and under-utilizing credit card company loyalty and reward programs, Wallaby launched last January out of southern California startup/accelerator program, MuckerLab to solve this problem.

Originally the concept was to have a single universal card that took the guesswork out of figuring out which card to use in order to maximize their cash back, travel miles, points or whatever their personal preferences happen to be. As of now, the app will let you set up preferences, then tell you exactly which card to use to get the most rewards back, taking into account the merchant, credit cards available, and any specials or promotions. According to anarticle in TechCrunch, Wallaby CEO Matthew Goldman told Sarah Perez, “…plans to develop a universal card weren’t being scrapped, but regulatory hurdles were slowing down the process of making that card available to the 10,000 consumers who had signed the company’s waitlist.”

So the way the app works is fairly simple, with users setting up personal preferences telling whether they prefer cash, rewards, points, etc. and the app then using GPS signals to determine the merchant, and display in order, what card to use to get the highest percentage cash back, for instance. And the way cards are sorted depend on individual preferences that were set up initially. The deals that each card provides are also displayed which lets consumers make their own decisions if they want.

“Before our service, consumers could only maximize their rewards if they manually compiled lists of all current promotions, read and understood all the fine print, and were able to make the right purchasing decision on the fly,” said Goldman. “It was an inefficient model, where many users simply gave up on actually using their earned rewards. With our Android app, our proprietary algorithms and technology do all of the work, so the consumer can relax in the knowledge that they are getting the most rewards with every single transaction.”